Thursday, 27 December 2012

AJC is dismayed by today's New York Times op-ed article, available online, “Don’t Let Pro-Israel Extremists Sink Chuck Hagel." The author is James Besser, a former Washington correspondent for the New York Jewish Week.

AJC Executive Director David Harris issued the following statement in response:

This op-ed is so replete with glaring errors of omission and commission that it's hard to know where to begin. Indeed, the very conceptual, or actually ideological, premise on which it is constructed is without foundation.

Essentially, the author argues that a group of wealthy right-wing zealots now call the shots in American Jewry. They have either taken over or, at the very least, intimidated mainstream groups like AJC into supporting, openly or quietly, their extremist agenda. This includes settlement expansion and seeking to silence anyone who doesn't yield to their political orthodoxies.

To be blunt, this is absolute and total rubbish.

First, AJC does not have such donors. Our donor list is made public in each annual report. I invite anyone to review the list.

Second, those who know us understand that we would not begin to yield to the will or whim of any such donors, be they of the doctrinal right or, for that matter, the left.

In fact, I can cite the cases of donors on both sides who dropped out of AJC in recent years precisely because we were not right-wing or left-wing enough for their taste.

Decision-making and direction are determined by AJC's Board of Governors through discussion and debate, involving close cooperation between lay leadership and staff. We welcome different points of view among our leaders and outside speakers who inform our thinking, a long-standing hallmark of AJC.

Third, our stance on Israel-related issues is staunchly centrist and non-ideological. An incredibly long paper and voice trail underscores that point, as do the daily examples of our diplomatic and political advocacy.

We fully support Israel's right to exist free of boycotts, divestment and sanctions, and the moral and political hypocrisy of double standards.

We steadfastly defend Israel's right to protect itself and its citizens.

We speak up for the special U.S.-Israel link, as serving the highest interests of both nations.

And we belabor under no illusions about the immense dangers Israel faces in a hostile, arms-laden region -- from Syrian chemical weapons to Iran's nuclear ambitions; from the deadly arsenals of Hamas and Hezbollah to the growing strength of political Islam.

At the same time, we have consistently, and over a long time, advocated for a two-state Israeli-Palestinian agreement.

We supported the Egyptian and Jordanian peace treaties, as well as Israeli-Palestinian peace efforts and Israel's unilateral withdrawals from southern Lebanon and Gaza.

We have expressed concern about settlement expansion (and settler-initiated violence) on multiple occasions dating back years, indeed decades.

Project Interchange, AJC’s educational initiative bringing leaders from different sectors in the U.S. and other countries to Israel, visits Ramallah regularly to meet with the Palestinian Authority. AJC’s Board of Governors, during its upcoming visit to Israel, also will meet with PA leaders, as it has consistently done on previous trips.

And no Jewish organization in the world has come close to our time spent, and relationships built, in the Arab or, for that matter, Muslim worlds.

Fourth, to begin the op-ed by using the possible nomination of Senator Chuck Hagel for Secretary of Defense as a case study is wrong-headed, to say the least. The author's attempt to sanitize Hagel's world view is mischievous at best, malicious at worst.

There are good reasons to be concerned about Hagel in the Pentagon, and one need not be a "zealot" or "extremist" to hold such views.

The Washington Post editorial board opposes his nomination. LGBT spokespersons, women's groups, and those worried about climate change also have voiced concern.

Hagel's voting record and statements on Iran-related issues alone should give pause to anyone who wonders what message his appointment could send to Tehran.

Fifth, to seek to draw a parallel with the NRA is particularly offensive, especially to those who have opposed the group's agenda.

We wish the NRA were remotely open -- say even one percent -- to the pluralistic views of Americans on gun rights and gun limits that organizations like AJC are to the direction of American Jewry and Israel.

Why the New York Times chose to publish such an off-base, politically motivated piece chock full of errors and distortions is beyond us.

No comments:

Jewish eugenics pre-dates Hitler's Master Race According to the Israeli daily newspaper quoted below, before the Nazi Third Reich in Germany plotted to create a Master Race from the European gene pool, Zionists had already established a racial purification program to create the perfect Jewish bloodline. More

From the horse's mouth:

"Our race is the Master Race. We are divine gods on this planet. We are as different from the inferior races as they are from insects. In fact, compared to our race, other races are beasts and animals, cattle at best. Other races are considered as human excrement. Our destiny is to rule over the inferior races. Our earthly kingdom will be ruled by our leader with a rod of iron. The masses will lick our feet and serve us as our slaves." -- Menachem Begin (Israeli Prime Minister, 1977-1983. Nobel Prize Winner for...Peace!)

At the dawn of civilization, the blood rite, in which human blood is drunk from the body of a still-living victim, was known to many tribes. However, only one people, that has never progressed beyond the Stone Age, has continued to practice the blood rite and ritual murder. This people are known to the world as Jews.

The author of this book is not Christian, Muslim or Hindu but a Jew and is the son of the Chief Rabbi of Rome, and a professor of Jewish Renaissance and Medieval History at Bar-Ilan University in Israel, just outside Tel Aviv.

The following translation was performed free of charge to protest an injustice: the destruction by the ADL of Ariel Toaff’s BLOOD PASSOVER on Jewish ritual murder.

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They cut this Palestinian kid's arms for "throwing Stones" before murdering him

Repeat: The author is the son of the Chief Rabbi of Rome, and a professor of Jewish Renaissance and Medieval History at Bar-Ilan University in Israel, just outside Tel Aviv.

Dr. Toaff is uniquely qualified to write this book, being thoroughly familiar with the derivative literature in English, French, German and Italian, as well as the original documentary sources in Latin, Medieval Italian, Hebrew and Yiddish. This is not something he worked on in secret. On the contrary, he worked on it openly with his university students and colleagues in Israel for several years; one of his students was even going to publish a paper on the subject. The author is extremely careful about what he says, and his conclusions must be taken seriously. It reads like a detective story.

If it had been published in Israel, in Hebrew, no one would have cared. There are large bodies of literature in Hebrew that Jews do not wish Gentiles to know about. But Dr. Toaff’s announcement of its publication in Italy, in Italian, raised a worldwide firestorm of fury. Under unbearable pressure, the book was withdrawn from publication, and is not to be re-issued.

You can strike a blow against censorship by circulating this text by e-mail or posting in on the Internet. No one can sue hundreds of people.

If the text is all over the Internet, and everybody has it and everybody knows what is in it, the cat will be out of the bag, and it will have to be published – sooner or later.

"When I open the police files I find detailed reports about Jewish criminals. The archives have enough
material for 100 historians and for 100 years, and even then they won't finish." -- Haartez News. Jerusalem, Tuesday, November 2,2004

1 - Since being branded an "anti-Semite" has become quite a stigma, placing in jeopardy the individual's economic and social welfare, should not the phrase be exactly and rationally defined? Inevitably someone is going to be mislabeled sometime. And yet the arch-Zionist Anti-Defamation League of Banai B'rith, which usually has charge of wielding the branding iron, has repeatedly refused to answer queries from this committee asking for such a definition. We have sadly concluded by wondering whether that "upright" organization should not more accurately be called the Anti-Definition League!

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2 - What is a "Semite"? Is it or is it not a member of a racial group? According to the prevailing Jewish authority, Jewry is a religious group only, with no racial (i.e., genetic) identity. Yet they continue tacitly to endorse a 19th century racialist conception of themselves every time they label an opponent "anti-Semitic." In order to get United Nations approval of a measure condemning religious discrimination recently, the so-called State of Israel gravely assented to having the word "anti-Jewish" substituted for "anti-Semitic." If the two are synonymous to any extent, would it not be more accurate if all Jewish organizations similarly dropped the meaningless and racist designation "anti-Semitic" in favor of "anti-Jewish"?

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3 - As we have seen, the majority of today's Jews are not descendants of the Old Testament Hebrews but of a Mongolian people of Central Asia called Khazars. These people were fairly recent converts to Judaism, as Arthur Koestler and earlier writers have shown. Yet, the non-Semitic Mongolian "Jews" are by far the most powerful in Jewish and Zionist affairs, and are the ones who quickest raise the cry of "anti-Semitism" against ideas or activities that irritate them. In the interest of historical accuracy, should not this peculiar but evidently necessary vocabulary of swear-words be enriched by the term "anti-Khazar"? At the very least, should not intelligent people realize that anti-Zionism does not equal "anti-Semitism"?

The Six Million Reconsidered, Committee for Truth in History, Historical Review Press

"The Jewish people as a whole will become its own Messiah. It will attain world dominion by the dissolution of other races, by the abolition of frontiers, the annihilation of monarchy and by the establishment of a world republic in which the Jews will everywhere exercise the privilege of citizenship. In this New World Order the "children of Israel" will furnish all the leaders without encountering opposition. The Governments of the different peoples forming the world republic will fall without difficulty into the hands of the Jews. It will then be possible for the Jewish rulers to abolish private property and everywhere to make use of the resources of the state. Thus will the promise of the Talmud be fulfilled, in which is said that when the Messianic time is come, the Jews will have all the property of the whole world in their hands."